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It’s no secret that authors use news headlines to create characters, but now the inverse is also true: Our appetites have convinced writers like Jonathon Frey, Margaret Seltzer and Herman Rosenblatt that bodies of fiction would reach a larger audience if presented as true stories. And they were right. Murder, sex, blood, and humiliation seem to have become our most cherished themes in literature. Tales which at one time would have appeared only in pulp fiction now form the backbone of award-winning fiction.

Recently I was asked to write a piece of tabloid fiction for an online magazine. The gist of the job description: Write a short fictional story based on the most sensational news of the week. I winced. I’d have to think about it and get back to them.

The week that I was first contacted, Luka Magnotta, a Canadian porn actor and model, had just been accused of murdering and dismembering his lover before he mailed the man’s body parts to the offices of two political parties and an elementary school not far from where I live in Vancouver. Magnotta had allegedly videotaped his crimes and posted them online.

The story had the makings to become the most media-hyped story since the Paul Bernardo murders. Tailor-made for what I’d been asked to write. The problem was that I didn’t know if I could face the prospect of immersing myself in a fictionalized account of something so grisly. I tried to imagine tangential possibilities, a story that would involve the character of the killer without placing my mind or that of my reader at the actual murder scene. It could really be anything, I reasoned, any imagined echo of, or repercussion for, the people involved.

A cranky side of my conscience tapped me on the back. “You sure you’re not just a bottom-feeder?”

I argued with myself, as I’m wont to do. “Writers use life to inform their fiction. I do it all the time.”

Which made me suspect myself all the more. “Why can’t you just make it up?”

“Because nothing’s made up! Not really. In every writer’s brain is the bit of life that informed the story that he or she is creating. You fictionalize in order to reveal a larger truth than what you see in front of you.”

Consider screenwriter Budd Schulberg, who once remarked, “One thing you do in writing dialogue is that you make up as little of it as you can and you listen as much as you can.”

After a 1998 screening of his Oscar-winning film, On the Waterfront, Schulberg commented on how much of his script had come directly from the mouths of the longshoremen he’d met in waterfront bars. He didn’t want movie clichés. He wanted three-dimensional human beings rather than easy-to-dismiss blue-collar roughnecks.

Perhaps it’s easier to justify this impulse when an author is writing about people who risk their livelihoods in order to do something heroic.

When we resist censorship, though, we must fight for the right to express ideas with which we don’t agree as aggressively as we fight for the right to express ideas with which we do. I would argue that the writer has a similar responsibility when putting characters on a page. Unless we see the person who commits a heinous crime as equally human to ourselves, we succumb to the impulse of perceiving nothing but the monster mask. It seems to me that the better able we are to see what is behind the mask, the better able we are to see the red flags that lead up to criminal acts and potentially take some action that could prevent it.

This is the conclusion I came to when I decided to accept the tabloid fiction assignment. Accused killer Luka Magnotta has since been arrested and is well out of the spotlight now. I can’t help feeling relief that there will be no pressure to take on his story.

Of course, not much time passes before yet another grim scene captures the world’s attention: recently a man who lost his job gunned down his former co-worker and then turned his weapon on police officers in front of the Empire State Building. Two people died, nine pedestrians were injured. At this moment, I’m not yet certain how to imagine this event in a fictional way.

In the meantime my conscience continues its merciless tap-tap-tapping. Thus far, one thing is certain, the attempt to rewrite the loss of life, the fear and vulnerability of those people is an exercise in humility.

Billie Livingston’s most recent novel, One Good Hustle, was long-listed for the 2012 Giller Prize. She will be appearing at Vancouver’s Word On the Street at 12:20 p.m. on Sept. 30. See www.billielivingston.com.

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